He's inspired many, but underneath lies a pessimism that his message may be too little too late.

Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychology professor-turned-culture warrior, is a man prepared for his own crucifixion.

In the preface to his recent bestseller 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, he describes a dream in which he found himself suspended in the air beneath the central dome of a great cathedral. Peterson knows enough about the symbolism of church architecture to realize that he was hanging at the center of the cross. In describing this dream, he compares himself to Christ: an individual with the courage to resist evil and speak the truth, no matter the cost.

When asked during an interview on Britain’s Channel 4 what was next for him, Peterson replied, “I don’t know what’s next really…. The overwhelming likelihood…is that this will go terribly wrong…. I’m surfing a hundred-foot wave and generally what happens if you do that is you drown.”

During a debate with a transgendered professor, Peterson flatly stated that he expects to be hauled in front of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for his refusal to comply with legislation that mandates the use of alternative pronouns. “If they fine me, I won’t pay it,” he said. “If they put me in jail, I’ll go on a hunger strike. I’m not doing this. And that’s that.”

Taken together, these statements show Peterson’s profound awareness that he will almost certainly be destroyed, directly or indirectly, by the leftist, postmodernist forces he defies. It’s difficult to defeat an inherently collectivist ideology when your own creed is one of individualism. Indeed, he perceives ideologues of every stripe as dangerous and mentally deficient and denounces white nationalism as no better than any other form of identity politics. He insists that it is only by strengthening individuals that the twin extremes of totalitarian order and anarchic chaos can be avoided.

If all this talk of crucifixion, hunger strikes, and the primordial forces of chaos sounds a little melodramatic, that’s because Peterson thrives on melodrama. His investment in archetypal stories might even necessitate it. In the New Yorker’s remarkably balanced piece on Peterson, the writer references his penchant for making “even the mildest pronouncement sound like the dying declaration of a political prisoner,” and despite the admiration I have for Peterson, I couldn’t help chuckling.

Peterson’s opponents often extend this persecution complex to his fans, whom they eagerly paint as alt-right misogynistic incels angry that women won’t sleep with them. One interviewer even spent several minutes trying to link Peterson to this depraved subculture, holding up a picture in which Peterson posed with a few fans holding a Pepe the Frog poster and demanding an explanation. The New York Times jumped on the same bandwagon with a shameful hit piece that willfully misinterpreted Peterson’s reference to “enforced monogamy”—which means nothing more than social norms that favor marriage and discourage promiscuity—as a government policy of dragging beautiful women from their homes and forcing them at gunpoint to marry neckbearded basement dwellers.

It doesn’t matter that Peterson has a far more nuanced understanding of the Pepe meme than the leftists who consider it equivalent to the swastika, or that he has explained time and again that he is trying to save his audience from radicalization, not push them toward it. Peterson’s enemies, it seems, are willing to say anything to villainize him and his fans.

If nothing else, Peterson has done us a service by showing us how truly dystopian our society has become. Fifteen short years ago, Barack Obama believed that marriage was between one man and one woman. Now such a statement reeks of unforgivable bigotry. The Overton Window is narrowing at a rate that can only be a bid for ultimate power, the authority to reprogram reality at will. In one debate, Peterson made a reference to “preferred pronouns,” only to have his opponent insist that they are not “preferred pronouns” but “correct pronouns.” In other words “ze,” “zir,” and all the rest, none of which anyone had heard of five years ago, are to be treated as objective truths. In a few brisk strokes, these ideologies have reduced the whole of Western history, from the Nicene Creed to the U.S. Constitution to the transphobic society of five years ago, to one unbroken saga of oppression. Only the present and the future exist. The past, even the recent past, is a hell beyond imagining and anyone who disagrees is defending privilege, not patrimony. It used to take generations to vilify our ancestors; now it can be done in a few short years.

This stranglehold on reality itself is reminiscent of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the most terrifying aspect of which is its inescapability. Orwell offers us no glimmer of hope, no possible means by which the harm the Party’s rule has inflicted on human society can ever be undone.

Peterson seems to think we are fast approaching this point, and he’s far from the only one who senses it. What liberals denounce as racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in Trump supporters may be, on some deeper level, a manifestation of that same fear. Trying to be respectable wasn’t working, so they adopted the ultimate scorched earth tactic. Trump does not represent “morning in America,” but a tacit admission night is fast descending.

If Peterson’s warnings about the government throwing people in jail for not using pronouns seem overstated, look to history. By the end of the 18th century, the peasants of the region of Western France known as the Vendée had lived for 1,000 years under the relative stability of Church and King. Then came the Revolution. A group of intellectuals, armed with an irrefutable body of theory and allied with the mob, seized power and told the men and women of the Vendée that everything they had ever pledged allegiance to was a lie designed to oppress them. Anyone still clinging to those lies was not only an enemy, but an enemy so perfidious as to be impossible even to reason with. The Reign of Terror in Paris receives the most attention in history books, but when the Vendée peasants rebelled, the revolutionary government came down on them with such fury that some historians consider it the first modern genocide.

Jordan Peterson understands that we may be too far gone. Either the entire Western world will slip beneath the sea of chaos never to resurface or, more likely given Peterson’s order/chaos dialectic, order will reassert itself with bloodshed. His exhortations to personal responsibility offer a middle way, but he understands better than anyone that his message may be too little too late.

Grayson Quay is a freelance writer and M.A. student at Georgetown University.

Jordan Peterson is not a traditional conservative, or a Christian, or even easily comprehensible. I am grateful to Jon at 10:04 and others who have shined a light on his Heidegerrian, Jungian, post-Marxist stew of philosophy.

I’ve watched enough of his videos and read well into “12 Rules” to know that I am not dealing with a Libertarian Catholic. He says things that are not useful to me, and he needs to step up his criticism of the alt-right.

However, I find his clear and principled stand against allowing his government to tell him what to say and what to think as extremely important for us all. Preferred pronouns are coming to a university near you, this year or next. Peterson is all the more admirable for engaging his opposition in civil dialogue.

Christians need to be a people who think, speak and act differently from the coarse culture. We need to speak the truth in love. We need to be peacemakers who engagein civil dialogue. While I don’t buy what this man says hook, line and sinker, I see someone engaging in honest dialogue, and you don’t see that too often. And he is willing to face the consequences of doing so.

In fact, an entire realm of concepts have followed in deconstructing heterosexual relations:

transexuality, transectionality, cross dressing, and coming right around the end — NAMBLA and the female equivalent.”

I really don’t get the point of engaging with these stale 1970’s comparisons. You people lost this debate 10 years ago. You can’t even hold on to your own children with this nonsense. As you all die off, the last dump of opposition will fade from existence. My life has been made no worse due to gay marriage and I live in the state that has had it the longest. Your appeals to your religion don’t move anyone who doesn’t share that religion. Social conservatism is absolutely toxic to the under 40 population. There is no political future for this stuff.

Peterson flatly stated that he expects to be hauled in front of the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal for his refusal to comply with legislation that mandates the use of alternative pronouns. “If they fine me, I won’t pay it,” he said. “If they put me in jail, I’ll go on a hunger strike. I’m not doing this. And that’s that.”

Me neither. I’m not a professor of anything. I didn’t even go to college. I’m a straight, white, working class American man. A Deplorable. I would put it differently. You can put your pronouns where the sun don’t shine.

The victors in the culture wars want revenge. They want people who share my demographics to suffer if not die. I can’t say I blame them but I don’t feel guilty and I strike back a anybody who strikes at me.

There is an economic apocalypse ABOVE the horizon. Very soon none of us will have the luxury of marinating in grievance. Extrapolating the present into the future is a depressing exercise. But current trends are about to terminate against a stone wall.

The author neglects to mention Peterson’s many other woman-hating comments, such as ‘chaos is feminine and order is masculine,’ ‘healthy women want a partner who is her superior in intellect, money, and power.’ How is this NOT misogyny?

You agree that pedophilia is a terrible crime, but insist that anyone who opposes it is doing so to destroy the Catholic Church. Well,that would have to include our own esteemed blog master.

As to the Eberstadt aticle,she jumps from the 70’s to the 2000’s, and leaves out that starting in the 80’s there developed a strong movement against pedophilia, and it was to a great extent due to feminists who saw it as a form of patriarchal male oppression.

I assume Eberstadt left this out because as a religious conservative, she is loath to admit that any good could come out of liberalism.

ReL: So I’m required – and perhaps must be compelled – to use “ze” and “zir,” then?

You know the only place I have ever seen “ze” and “zir” is in scare quotes on this website in assorted social conservative alarmist articles. Out here in the real world those pronouns do not exist. Now, there have been proposals to create gender neutral third person pronouns for English for a long time– I remember reading such ideas back in my youth. They haven’t caught and no one uses them. It is considered au courrant to use the standard gendered English pronouns according to how trans people present themselves (“she” for a guy in drag; “he” for a woman who has transitioned to a man), but that usage actually affirms sexual differences.

Quote: What liberals denounce as racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in Trump supporters may be, on some deeper level, a manifestation of that same fear. Trying to be respectable wasn’t working, so they adopted the ultimate scorched earth tactic. Trump does not represent “morning in America,” but a tacit admission night is fast descending.

I disagree that supporters of President Trump have adopted a scorched earth tactic. I do think that voters chose him because he is an outsider who promised to reign in the liberal elite (consisting of both DC/NY/LA Democrats and Republicans). Don’t forget the Democrats offered a very corrupt choice in Hillary, and that none of the other 16 or so Republican candidates were fighters and that all except Trump would be happy dwelling in the swamp.

I highly recommend Conrad Black’s new book, “Donald J. Trump: A President Like No Other” for a more reasonable view of the president.

You agree that pedophilia is a terrible crime, but insist that anyone who opposes it is doing so to destroy the Catholic Church. Well,that would have to include our own esteemed blog master.”
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I think it was a useful “tool” to use against the Church. It only becomes that tool depending on one’s agenda & if the Church is still seen as powerful enough to warrant the effort.

It’s perfectly appropriate to condemn the sexual exploitation of children. But historically, that’s been condemned selectively I think.

mrscracker says:It’s perfectly appropriate to condemn the sexual exploitation of children. But historically, that’s been condemned selectively I think.

Historically, everything is condemned selectively. That is human nature.

The fact is that the decrease in acceptance of pedophilia came well before the Church scandals came to public light. It is much more likely to have come from feminism than from hatred of the Church. I don’t doubt the Church scandals helped a bit though.

Karen says:
June 10, 2018 at 6:46 pm
The author neglects to mention Peterson’s many other woman-hating comments, such as ‘chaos is feminine and order is masculine,’ ‘healthy women want a partner who is her superior in intellect, money, and power.’ How is this NOT misogyny?

I don’t agree with the first quote, but women do have a marked preference for socially powerful men. I would amend the second statement to say women in general, rather than healthy women, and I would also leave out intellect, as women don’t really care about how smart their husbands are.

Socially conservative outbreed social liberals by a fairly vast margin – both native and immigrant. The only way liberal values have been able to hold on is via programming – education and the media. That strangehold only needs to slip very slightly and things will turn back conservative via natural selection. I think that liberals, unconciously know that social conservativism is the default – hence why they are so threatened by challenges to the overton window; they know what they have created is a bubble.

Karen, neither chaos nor order are superior in petersons ideology, both need to be in balance. Excessive order is, according to peterson fascistic, and excessive chaos anarchic. So you reading a negative into the classically chaos/moon/water associated “potentiality from chaos” archetype throughout all of history as a negative for women, is entirely in your own reading. Pick up any historical religion and compare goddesses with gods in terms of “domain” – it’s consistent. The symbology of male and female, as archetypes is not under any serious academic question. But it’s also not important – it’s like saying “mother earth” and “father time” – the earth be bountiful and chaotic, and time being orderly and regimented.

As for hypergamy, studies have shown that women verbally identity themselves as finding power, money and fame as attractive. #notall. So this is not really a contraversial statement, any more that saying men tend on aggregate to seek women who are young and attractive. Whether it’s young feminists complaining that men aren’t educated enough, or traditionalists wanting a man who provides, it’s pretty standard women seek men with high competancy, whereas men don’t really care as much about how competant their female partners are.

Reality isn’t mysogynistic. It may not comply with your expectations, but it doesn’t have bias.